CD Review: Oceansize - Everyone Into position (Beggars Banquet, 2005)

Girth. Wideness. Voluminousness. Really fucking large humungousness. That's what Brit-brain-rock heroes Oceansize strive for.

That all-enveloping blanket of sound - covering, submerging, bewildering and occaisionally battering the listener with layer upon layer of pink noise. And you know what? It really works.

Everyone Into Position is the second full-length album from the Manchester five-piece, the follow-up to 2003's stunning Effloresce, a record which wowed pretty much everyone that heard it, with its mix of the post-rock sensibilities of Mogwai and the metal nous of Tool. The band aren't ready to rest on their laurels though, and instead of regurgitating the same-old space rock epics, they have been steadily growing their sound into something even more hard to pin down.

The album is at the same time heavier and more chilled than their debut. Tracks like Music For A Nurse and Meredith sound like slow-motion fire, licking at the ears before they build almost inperceptibly to car-crash levels on intensity. Meredith itself contains some of the most monged out sounds I've ever heard - an off key electronic noise hidden behind the music playing havok with your brain. Awesome.

On the other side of the scale, songs such as A Homage to a Shame and No Tommorow take no prisoners, and tear into the listener with glorious three guitar violence and blastbeats that sound more like Sikth than My Bloody Valentine. Obviously building on the experiments on the Music for Nurses EP, the heavy tracks on the album are amoung the most complicated and satisfying pieces the band have ever written, and longtime fans will be shocked and pleased by just how good the band have got. Of course, newcomers will have their minds blown, and that can only be a good thing.

The standout tracks on the album are easily the first single Heaven Alive, New Pin and the final tryptich. The single contains one of the cheekiest, bounciest bass-lines ever put to plastic and rolls along at a perfect head-nodding pace until the chorus takes off like a guitar-fuelled spaceship (a rockship). New Pin also has a perfect rolling tempo mixed with hypnotic, pulsing drums and multi-layered vocal and guitar effects that give the song a pleasantly poppy and relaxingly propulsive sound (although you're never gonna hear this on your local cheesy listening station).

The album closes with perhaps the most epic suite of songs since the Mars Volta's Francis the Mute. Three tracks clocking in at over 21 minutes comprise what the band have called the Church Suite. Featuring organs, angelic vocals, Stephen Hawkings' voicebox (presumably borrowed from Radiohead, another obvious but massive influence on the band) and a really amazing grasp of quiet-loud dynamics, Oceansize really out-do themselves with some of the most kinetic and inventive music of the year.

Combining all the best bits of prog and post rock, moulding them into actual songs and then rocking like giant fucking mountains of noise, Oceansize have made another perfect record for people bored with 4-minute pop songs disguised as rock music and who want a little more depth from an ear-pummeling.

Highly recommended.

www.oceansize.co.uk

Touching base ... ... dammit, might as well shoot myself now...

Phew! Been a busy week in the Vagus Nerve community. I've been building, then pimping the shit out of my band's new website http://www.vagusnervemusic.co.uk (which I think is looking rather spiffy, thankyouverymuch) as well as getting ready for our next gig at the Tumbley in Farnborough on the 29th of Sept.

It should go pretty well, our last gig there was proper jaw-dropping, and that was with Lewis so pissed that he could barely play his guitar. This time, Mr. Jones (or Chemo, as we're calling him since he shaved his head) has sworn off the evil amber nectar, although the usual routine of getting good and stoned before we play will still be in effect.

It feels like we're actually getting somewhere at the moment. The new EP is, in my unbiased opinion, fucking awesome; the website's looking shit-hot and we're getting gigs again with new, more exciting songs to play at the shows. It's all good.

It is a frustrating time to be in a heavy local band though, as we're going through a bit of an indie-meets-the-Clash phase in rock at the moment, and Vagus Nerve don't really gel too well with these bands. We're just looking for other bands with our music ethic - play loud, fast and interesting rock. All the bands around at the moment are either trying to sound like Franz Ferdinand or Killswitch Engage - there doesn't seem to be much room in the middle for experimentation, which is sad. Hopefully the pendulum of fashion will swing back to heavy, grungy bands, and we'll be ready, primed and fuckin' there.

In other news, I'm adapting to my new job pretty well, even though it makes me more tired than I ever knew existed, I'm enjoying it and looking forward to the pay-packet at the end of the month more than anything!

TTFN!

Notes from... Vagus Nerve?!

Well, it had to happen eventually, didn't it? Kaizer is dead, long live Vagus Nerve!

For those of you wondering what the hell I'm talking about, my band Kaizer has had to change it's name thanks to the Kaiser fuckin' Chiefs getting so bloody popular that we couldn't tell anyone our name without them going "Ohh, like the Kaiser Chiefs...".

So now we're Vagus Nerve (click here if you're a geek), and if we find any other bands with this name then somebody dies.

To celebrate, we've just recorded another clutch of instant classics over at Earth Terminal Studios in Odiham, with our friend Lewis Childs. The EP has yet to be named, and the artwork is still to be finished but the songs included will be Alpha Rhythm, the epic Jesus the Vampire and the Chav Test Dummies and the classic (in our eyes) Theme for War.

We've been waiting to record these for tiiiiiiime, and we're absolutely stoked with how they sound, and I think that it's easily better than our first effort, Silhouette on White Horizon.

And, as a bonus for you, the trendy-as-fuck blogging audience, is a free MP3 of Alpha Rhythm! Enjoy, and if you listen to it, you must leave a comment! We need feedback people!

Coulda, Shoulda, Didn't

Well hello out there in internet land. How has your summer been? Good?

Oh, Mine? Shit. Really, really shit.

Okay, lot's to get through in this story of woe, so I'll skip the details and give a blow by blow account of my shitty summer, which not only explains why I've not been updating, but also why I won't be going back to Uni next year...

Following the end of the last semester of year two of my Journalism degree coure, I thought I was all set to start my summer job at a local college. I had been offered it the previous year, so I thought it was in the bag... only it wasn't, and due to budget cutbacks, I had no job to return to. I found this out the ame day I found out my overdraft was shallower than I'd previously thought, and I only had about £10 left. Oh bugger.

As I scrabbled around the local temping agencies, it soon became apparent that there were no jobs in the area. I almost got one, but my reference fell through and they wouldn't let me start, and all the time, I have fuck all money.

I had to give up comics, which was kind of like a piece of me dying inside. Seriously, I've been buying the things for over twelve years - it broke my heart to not be trotting to the comic store on a Saturday to find out what Batman had been up to that week.

At around the same time, my PSU on my PC blew up again, leaving me not only without comics, but without even the internet! Argh!

Weeks turned into months, and eventually, I managed to get little bits and bobs of work - a few days here, a week there, but it's still nowhere enough to live on, and my girlfriend, the saintly Ellie and my mum don't earn nearly enough to support my fat lazy ass.

Eventually, the interviews began to roll in, and I got some neat data-input work that allowed me to fix my PC and get stoned again (can't be doing without that now, can we?) but I was still in dire doo-doo.

All the while this was going on, I completely forgot about Uni, it just wasn't relevant when you're trying to scrape up the pennies to buy dinner (literally). Student loans, work experience - I know it sounds stupid, but I forgot it, until it was too late. This, coupled with the fact that I didn't want to - no, couldn't - spend another year stone broke meant I had to make the decision to take a year off.

So, my Uni friends (all three of you, lol), I'm sad to say that I won't be seeing you much next year. I'll miss the laughs, the learning, the eye candy (you know who you are), but I'll be back the following year to finish my degree, which is the important thing.

In the meantime, I've just started a new job, and my confidence is on the increase again. I still don't get paid till the end of September, so I've got another tough month ahead, but the important thing is, I will get paid, and when I do...

..

COMICS MUTHAFUCKA!!!

Anyone wants to catch up, call me names or send me naked photos, e-mail me.

I know I say this a lot, but normal service will be resumed shortly, I promise!

Update Quicky

I got my online journalism marks back today, and for those that haven't read the last post, this blog began as part of that module. After a tense, nervous wait thanks to Jim, our sadistic tutor, telling us our results one by one, I found out I got the my only First of the semester with a respectable 75% score.

The plus side of this means this blog is officially awesome, and that I'm beginning to see blogging, and online journalism as a more viable career path than I would've 4 months ago. I've got the summer off Uni as of today, although I am going to have to work a summer job to claw my way out of the finacial black hole I have just found myself in. Through the summer, I'm going to update this blog as much as possible, and continue to add features to my 'personal website' (damn that sounds fey), in addition to the Gaming Surgery feature on there now.

Anyway, it's nice to have a direction, so stay tuned for some actual blogging rather than this odd pseudo-diary. I've just got to stop watching cartoons long enough to find something to write about.

I'm also off to see Star Wars: Episode III tomorrow, and frankly I can't wait. I thought the Clone Wars anime was about as good as it gets - all fanboy-wet-dream lightsabre poses and clone army troopers. Lucas better get this one right, or dammit, I'm gonna set fire to his house (ps, Lucas, this is a joke. Can I come round for dinner one day? Please?).

I'm bad, sue me

Okay, so I'm a terrible blogger for not having posted for 2+ weeks. I would have an excuse, but I really don't, other than that I've been letting un-real life wash over me like tepid but cosy bathwater. This is a long way of saying that I've been watching cartoons and playing games for a bit. Which was nice.

I did deserve the break I guess, allowing me to recouperate after the clusterfuck that always is the last few weeks of the semester, when all the uni work that you've yet to start is due to be handed in. The ensuring panic means that a) I usually pull some stunning piece of work right out of my arse in the last minute and b) there's no way in hell I'm gonna have time for any blogging or web-surfing (aside from the porn, but that's stress relief, honest).

We're getting the marks back this week. They include an essay for Politics and the Public Sphere about dumbing down, a 3000-word mammoth written over three days with only three books, which got me 69%, or a 2:1. I feel that giving me one point from a First is the tutor's wat of saying "Must try harder". I swaer, I'm going to put that on my gravestone.

Today I got my results for Investigational Journalism, which was a story about why magic mushrooms have been made illegal in the UK. I thought it was okay, but I wrote it all in about four days, from concept to hand-in, because another story fell through. I got 66% for that, which is another respectable 2:1, a fair mark in my opinion.

Tommorow I get my grade for online journalism, which was were this blog came from. The course requirements meant I also had to make a 'personal website', something I hadn't done since I was like 12 years old, learning HTML on notepad. Hopefully, I should get an okay mark for this, after all, I really have enjoyed and (hopefully) done pretty well with, being an online junky anyway.

***

There's the diary stuff outta the way, now I quickly want to talk about cartoons, cause dammit, none of my friends give a shit about them. Just before the uni work was due, I found Iso Hunt, an awesome search engine that actually searches the web for bit-torrents, taking much of the pain of of this awesome file-sharing protocol.

I made my standard search from 'Batman', hoping against experience to find copies of the awesome Gotham Knights cartoon from the late 90's, a show that I'd never seen, and desperately wanted to. When the seach came back with about 200 hundred entries, including both seasons of Gotham Knights, and the new The Batman series, I nearly pissed myself I was so happy.

I'm a massive Bat-fan, and it's always cheesed me off that living in the UK, we never get to see most of the awesome cartoons they show in America. Over here, they're relegated to the backwaters of cable at un-godly hours of the morning or skipped over entirely. Now, I've watched all the old Gotham Knights episode's I'd missed (including some awesome ones with Nightwing, a character who needs more mainstream exposure) and caught up with the new series, The Batman, which is startlingly different.

For starters, they've abandoned the Dini/Timm animation style, and all of the voice cast of the old show, which was a bit of a shock. Nobody does the Joker like Mark Hamill, it's just a fact, and the dreadlocked, cyber-punk Joker of the new series is a pretty redical departure. The new Batman style is pretty cool, if a little jarring at first. He reminds me of Mazzulcelli (Year One)'s Batman rather than the old style.

I've also been dibbing the new episodes of Family Guy and American Dad, which are pretty awesome too. It brilliant that DVD sales can revive a cancelled classic, and it's still as funny as ever, my favourite line so far being Stewie calling Brian a "see you next tuesday" which is about as daring as US TV gets I think. Still makes the Simpsons look like the Waltons.

So now I'm downloading Season one of Justice League Unlimited. Life is good.

Hey, I wonder how illegal this is?

Finally, something cool

Usually when you read stories on blogs by left-leaning young people about the government, it's gonna be bad. "I'm not going to uni because of top-up fees!" "They're making people racist by demonising immigrants!" "They're making weed class B again?!"

Well, how about a good news story, this time from the American government. No, they haven't released the files on who really shot Kennedy, or let us into Area 51.

Instead, they've compiled a list of 100 'culturally significant' sound recordings, from great speeches to Elvis Presley. Whats cool about this though, is the inclusion of some rather left-field albums, from Nirvana's Nevermind to Public Enemy's Fear of a Black Planet.

See? There are still some cool people left in the world, even in the halls of power! Although I've got a feeling that a couple were snuck in when Tipper Gore wasn't looking...

Click here for the full list.